In recent years, the popularity of digital cameras has lead to a flourish of personal digital photos. For example, Kodak Gallery, Flickr and Picasa Web Album host millions of new personal photos uploaded every month. Many of these images were photos taken when people visited various interesting places or attending various interesting events around the world.
With the popularity of digital cameras and online photo sharing, it is common for different people, who may or may not know each other, to attend the same event and take pictures and videos from different spatial or personal perspectives using different cameras.
In addition, people typically on their own take many more photos than needed with digital cameras due to the high storage capacity and low cost of flash memory cards. Therefore, collectively people often end up with multiple photo albums or media streams, each with many photos, for the same event. It is desirable to enable these people to share their pictures and videos in order to enrich memories and facilitate social networking. However, it is cumbersome to manually select and arrange these photos from different digital cameras of which the time settings are often not calibrated.
At the same time, it is non-trivial to perform the same task automatically using a computer algorithm because the digital camera settings of the multiple digital cameras are usually not coordinated. If the clock in every camera is perfectly set and thus in sync with others, it would be easy to align all the photos taken by different digital cameras and manage them accordingly.
A fast-emerging trend in digital photography and community photo sharing is user tagging and geo-tagging. Geo-tagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as websites or images and is a form of geospatial metadata. It can help users find a wide variety of location-specific information. For example, one can find images taken near a given location by entering latitude and longitude coordinates into a geo-tagging enabled image search engine. Geo-tagging-enabled information services can also potentially be used to find location-based news, websites, or other resources. Capture of geo-coordinates or availability of geographically relevant tags with pictures opens up new data mining possibilities for better recognition, classification, and retrieval of images in personal collections and the Web. The published article of Lyndon Kennedy, Mor Naaman, Shane Ahern, Rahul Nair, and Tye Rattenbury, “How Flicks Helps us Make Sense of the World: Context and Content in Community-Contributed Media Collections”, Proceedings of ACM Multimedia 2007, discussed how geographic context can be used for better image understanding.
The availability of geo-tagged and user-tagged photos can help establish correspondence between media streams of images and videos captured for the same event by different cameras. For example, if two images from different media streams captured for the same event are tagged with the same location, they are likely to have been taken at the same time. Similarly, if two images from different media streams captured for the same event are tagged with the same image annotation, they are also likely to have been taken at the same time.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,730,036 discloses a method for organizing digital content records and comprising the steps of: receiving a plurality of digital content records, at least some of said digital content records having associated metadata identifying at least a time-date of capture, a location of capture, or a time-date of capture and a location of capture, wherein at least one of the digital content records has associated metadata identifying a time-date of capture, and at least one of the digital content records has associated metadata identifying a location of capture; defining an event at least by identifying a set of event boundaries associated at least with a span of time and a geographic area; identifying digital content records (“event content-records”) of the plurality of digital content records to be associated with the event, at least some of the digital content records being identified as event-content records because they meet metadata conditions, wherein the metadata conditions include that the time-date-of-capture metadata and the location-of-capture metadata of the corresponding digital content records identify a time-date-of-capture and a location-of-capture within the span of time and the geographic area, respectively; associating at least some of the event content-records (“associated event-content-records”) with the event; storing information identifying the association of the at least some of the event content-records with the event in a computer-accessible memory; and wherein the location-of-capture metadata identifies a network address of a network access point, wherein the geographic area event boundary is defined at least in part by a particular network address, and wherein the metadata conditions include that the network address correspond to the particular network address.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,978,047 describes storing multiple views of the same event for surveillance applications, but in this case, the video cameras are already perfectly synchronized. This system does not provide a way for relating asynchronous captures that occur in less controlled events. U.S. Pat. No. 7,158,689 describes handling asynchronously captured images of an event, but the event type is a special case of a timed event such as a race, and contestants are tracked at various fixed stations. All the above mentioned methods are specific to the applications being described, and provide no framework for handling the generalized problem of managing multiple media streams captured asynchronously at the same event.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 20100077289 describes a method for organizing digital content records, and the method includes the steps of (1) receiving a first set of digital content records captured from a first digital-content capture device, each digital content record in the first set having associated therewith time/date of capture information defining when the associated digital content record was captured, wherein the capture information associated with a particular digital content record from the first set defines that its associated digital content record was captured over a contiguous span of time; (2) receiving a second set of digital content records captured from a second digital-content capture device, each digital content record in the second set having associated therewith time/date of capture information defining when the associated digital content record was captured; and (3) ordering the first set of digital content records and the second set of digital content records along a common capture timeline based at least upon the time/date of capture information, or a derivative thereof, associated with each of the digital content records in the first and second sets, wherein the ordering step causes the particular digital content record and at least one other digital content record to be associated with a same time/date within the span of time in the capture timeline. In addition, their ordering step orders the digital content records along the common timeline also based upon (a) objects identified in, (b) scenery identified in, (c) events associated with, or (d) locations associated with the digital content records.